A brief history about some the most relevants facts , and ignored, of WWII

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German atrocities and brutalities ( II )

It is important to remember that the brutality was the norm in all Germanperformances.The following is one of many thousands of brutalities, psychiatric patients boarding for their extermination from Holland. (Saul Friedländer. The Years of extermination, pp. 412-413)

At
the. beginning of 1943 the Germans started rounding up the
approx­Imately eight thousand Jewish patients in various
hospitals, and among them the psychiatric inmates of Het Apeldoornse
Bos. The raid on this largest Jewish mental institution was conducted
on the night of January 21 by a Schutzpolizei unit under the personal
command of Aus der Funten. The patients were ferociously beaten and
pushed into trucks. "I saw them place a row of patients,"
an eyewitness declared, "many of them older women, on mattresses
at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human
bodies on top of them. So crammed were these trucks that the Germans
had a hard job to put up the tail-boards." The trucks carried
the patients to the cordoned-off Apeldoorn railway station.

According
to the station master's report, when he tried to activate the
ventilation system in the wagons, the Germans closed them. The report
then contInued: ¨"I remember the case of a girl of twenty to
twenty-five whose arms were pinioned [in a straightjacket] but who
was otherwis: stark naked .... Blinded by the light that was flashed
in her face, the girl ran, fell on her face and could not, of course,
use her arms to break the fall She crashe.d down with a thud .... In
general, the loading was done wIthout great
violence. The ghastly thing was that when
the wagons had to be closed: the patients refused to take their
fingers away. They simply would not lIsten to us and in the end the
Germans lost patience. The result was a brutal and inhuman
spectacle." Some fifty (Jewish) nurses accompanied the
transport.

A
Dutch Jew described the arrival of the transport in Auschwitz: "It
was one one the most horrible transports from Holland that I saw.
Many of the patIents tned to break through the barrier and were shot
dead. The remainder were gassed immediately." There are
diverging accounts of the fate of the nurses, none of whom survived
Some declare that they were sent to the camp; others that they were
gassed; according to another witness "some of them were thrown
into a pit, doused with gasoline, and hurned alive." Aus der
Funten had promised them that they could return immediately after the trip or work in
the East in a thoroughly modern mental institution.

In
early 1943 the Germans established the Vught labor camp, which
supposedly would allow Jews to remain as forced laborers in Holland.
It was a sophisticated "legal" option to avoid deportation;
the council strongly encouraged it, and the obedient Dutch Jews went
along. Of course it was one further German scam, and the Vught
inmates were sys­tematically transferred to Westerbork or, on
several occasions, deported directly to the East.

Between
July 1942 and February 1943, fifty-two transports carrying 46,455
Jews left Westerbork for Auschwitz. Some 3,500 able-bodied men were
redirected to the hydrogenation plant in Blechhammer (later Auschwitz
III-Monowitz and Gross Rosen). Of the workers' group, 181 men
survived the war; of the remaining 42,915 from the 1942 and early
1943 transports, 85 remained alive. 54 The deportations went on.

An interesting article about the survivors of newly liberated city of Kahrkov ( 4th March 1943 ).